Old Aunt Jemima Analysis

Betye Saar was born January 30, 1926. As a young girl Saar spent her summers with her paternal grandmother in Watts, California. This is where she got her first glimpse of real art. In the 1930’s Watts was a very racially mixed community. Saar watched an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia piece together what would become the glittering spirals of the Watts Towers. In and article with NPR Saar remembered the experience with this "And he wanted to make something monumental. And he put these steel structures up and covered them in cement and pressed shards of ceramics, of plates, I 've seen corncobs in there, I 've seen tools. It 's like, the cement is wet, what can we put in here? I think that was the beginning of me becoming an assemblagist or recycler." After her father’s passing in 1931, she moved with her family to live her maternal great-aunt and her husband

The background of this piece is covered with Aunt Jemima advertisements while the foreground is dominated by a larger Aunt Jemima notepad holder with a picture of a mammy figure and a white baby inside. The idea of Aunt Jemima was originally in a Billy American-style minstrelsy song “Old Aunt Jemima” written in 1875. The Aunt Jemima character was prominent in minstrel shows in the late 19th century and was later adopted by commercial interests to represent the Aunt Jemima brand. This figure holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. In front of the picture is a clenched fist. This piece was made during the art movement of the 1070s. The Black Arts movement was an artistic branch of the Black Power Movement. Writer and activist Imamu Amiri Baraka started it in Harlem. Many of the artwork of this movement including literature, film, theater, and music was filled with emotion and anger of the injustices of the time. This assemblage is made out of wood, pictures, figurines, and other household